As your MacBook ages, your battery performance decreases — that’s just a fact of life. But if you correctly calibrate and maintain your battery, it’s possible to improve performance and put off replacing it for as long as possible.

Calibrating Your MacBook Battery

If you have a MacBook or a MacBook Pro, you should calibrate your lithium-ion batteryHow To Increase The Lifetime Of Your Laptop BatteryHow To Increase The Lifetime Of Your Laptop BatteryA laptop with a short battery life is a nuisance, especially when you're on the road and nowhere close to a power socket. To make each individual charge of your battery last longer, learn about...Read More once a month. According to Apple, MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs released after mid-2009 are pre-calibrated and don’t require calibration. Other laptops, however, can benefit from a calibration. Batteries have internal microprocessors, and properly calibrating them will keep your onscreen battery display accurate and your battery operating at maximum efficiency.

A properly-calibrated and battery will help you keep tabs on your power source and prevent the annoyance of having your computer not give you a warning before it goes to sleep or telling you that it has a few minutes left when it could easily go for another few hours. After a successful calibration, your MacBook’s battery meter will be a lot more accurate.

To calibrate the battery on your MacBook, you’ll need to perform a full cycle through the battery’s life.

Plug in the power adapter and fully charge your PowerBook’s battery until the light ring or LED on the power adapter plug changes to green and the onscreen meter in the menu bar indicates that the battery is fully charged.

Allow the battery to rest in the fully charged state for at least two hours. You may use your computer during this time as long as the adapter is plugged in.

Disconnect the power adapter while the computer still on and start running the computer off battery power. You may use your computer during this time. When your battery gets low, the low battery warning dialog appears on the screen.

At this point, save your work. Continue to use your computer; when the battery gets very low, the computer will automatically go to sleep.

Turn off the computer or allow it to sleep for five hours or more.

Connect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged again.

Even though safe sleep mode will save any open files when your computer goes to sleep, it’s a good idea to save everything and close your apps before it goes to sleep. Once you’ve run the calibration cycle, your computer will have a much better idea of how much power is really left in your battery.

As you can see here, you get the current charge level, current and original maximum charge, an estimate of time remaining on the current charge, number of cycles, age, and pretty much everything else you need to monitor the overall health of your battery.

The most important things here are the health percentage and the number of cycles. The health number is the total percentage of the original max charge that your battery can hold. Cycles are a measure of how much use your battery has received—as it increases, your battery performance will degrade.

This page shows the number of cycles that your MacBook battery can go through before it’s considered “consumed” and should be replaced. Most new models can handle about 1,000 cycles, but some older models are only rated for 500 or so.

Maintaining Your MacBook’s Battery

So now that you have a good idea of how well your battery is working, what can you do to make sure that you get the best performance out of it for a long period of time? There are a number of things you can do to keep it working well, including, surprisingly, unplugging it.

It’s important to keep energy moving through your battery to keep it running smoothly—if it’s always plugged in and rarely discharged, you might see a decrease in performance long before you’ve reached a high cycle count. Make sure to unplug and discharge your battery on a daily basis. You don’t have to take it all the way down to the emergency sleep state, but make sure that your battery is putting in the work it needs to stay healthy.

The other big thing is to make sure that you get as much as possible out of each charge cycle. If you’re using each cycle as efficiently as possible, it’ll take longer to go through a charge cycle and your count will increase more slowly, giving you better long-term battery life. So taking steps to maximize the use you get out of each charge doesn’t just pay off by letting you use your laptop longer, it also has long-term benefits.

Extraneous apps and connections can also take a toll on your battery, so close apps that you’re not using – especially if they open connections to refresh. Social networking and IM apps, iTunes, Dropbox, Messages, FaceTime, and Skype often accept incoming connections, and this can be a drain on your battery. Going to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Firewall > Firewall Options will let you choose which applications are allowed to accept incoming connections with the OS X firewallHow To Enable the Firewall In Mac OS X Snow LeopardHow To Enable the Firewall In Mac OS X Snow LeopardSince we rarely hear about security problems with Apple hardware, we Mac users often ignore some of Apple's basic security applications and features such as the Firewall. It’s easy to set up, but there are...Read More. You can also choose to block them all.

Replacing Your Macbook’s Battery

If your battery doesn’t hold much of a charge, you may want to get it replaced. While you can do it yourself with the aid of a resource like iFixit, it’s generally recommended that you bring it into an Apple store and let them do it. If you make an appointment at a store, you can usually get it replaced the same day. Having Apple replace the battery will cost you between $129 for a MacBook Air, 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro; $179 for a 17-inch MacBook Pro; or $199 for a MacBook Pro Retina.

Having Apple replace your battery will maintain any warranty or Apple Care plan you still have on the machine, whereas doing it yourself or approaching a third-party won’t – though you’ll likely save on parts and labor.

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Viking

May 6, 2016 at 7:50 pm

I was just given a mid 2011 11 inch macbook air a couple days ago and the battery doesn't last too long. I used an coconutBattery to check the status of the battery and 2 days ago it showed Design capacity at 88.9%. I've been charging the battery and then using it until the battery gets low since I got it and now cocnutBattery says the Design capacity is at 90.7%
Not sure if that's correct or not, but perhaps the charge to 100% and run it down to almost dead is helping some? This battery is 1536 days old, but has only been charge cycled 120 times. The person that gave it to me must have kept it on the charger all the time, rarely using it away from her desk.

Hm . . . the full cycles could help, but it's also possible that it's a difficult number to calculate, and the 1.8% change is just standard error. That seems somewhat likely, too. How has it been performing since you left your comment?

I recently replaced the battery in my mid 2009 macbook pro. I did not calibrate the battery. Now the computer suddenly shuts down at around 25% with no warning. How can I do a calibration if the computer isn't running the battery all the way down?

From your article, "According to Apple, MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs released after mid-2009 are pre-calibrated and don’t require calibration." So, why are we even talking about this in 2015?

Well, this article was published in 2014, which was only 5 years after the 2009 computers were made, and a lot of them are still being used, so the owners of those computers were likely to benefit from this information. Also, some people may want to calibrate their batteries anyway, despite Apple's assertion that they're pre-calibrated, as it could potentially offer slightly better performance monitoring.

Thanks for commenting! Glad the article was helpful, and that your MBP is still running well. Getting seven years out of a laptop isn't always an easy feat. :-)

macuser

November 19, 2015 at 5:32 am

I run my battery from 100% always to around 7-4%.. around then I plug it in and use it while it is charging until it reaches 100%. Then I repeat. I have over 800 cycles and my battery holds 85% of its charge still.

I would like some clarification on this article; specifically, with the calibration of the battery.

Let's say my laptop is fully charged and I take it to school with me; I then proceed to use it for a few hours, to the point where the battery reads, let's say, 78%. In order to maintain the optimal battery condition, should I not plug it in to charge and continue to use it (on battery power) until it completely drains? In a word, should the recalibration be performed as often as possible?

Is it going to be costly in the long run if I were to charge it fully after it has decreased to 78%? What if I were to repeat this numerous times over before a complete discharge?

You don't need to do the recalibration as often as possible. The recalibration isn't going to improve your battery life noticeably, but it will help you get more accurate readings on the power level of your battery, which could help you do other things to improve the health of your battery. I recalibrate my battery once every couple months, more often if I'm on an older computer that goes to sleep without warning me that my battery is getting low. As for increasing the cost (either monetarily or in battery life) by recharging after going down to 78%, I wouldn't worry about it too much. It's better to run it down further than that, but even going down that far will have benefits.

I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to use it during the charging phase. Unfortunately, doing a full calibration takes a while and means that you can't use your computer for several hours. Take advantage of the time and go do something fun. :-)

Dann is a freelance business and technology writer. When he's not on his bike, he's looking for new ways to help people be productive, meet their goals, and maintain a healthy relationship with technology.